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In the coming weeks I will be posting chapters from the book. Today I offer the Introduction and Chapter 1.
If you are considering a job in a charter school, or if you know someone who is considering working in a charter school, or if you are thinking about enrolling a child in a charter school, please read and share before making that decision.
Introduction: “Negro Problems”
and Philanthropic Solutions
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. –William Faulkner (1951)
Shortly
after the end the Civil War, a decommissioned Yankee general who was also the
son of a former missionary superintendent for the Hawaiian plantation schools,
opened the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. When named as Hampton's first superintendent in
1868, Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s mission was to rigorously indoctrinate young
freedmen to become workers and teachers who would fan out across the South to
teach basic literacy to black children and to instill a lifelong devotion to
the “dignity of labor” (Anderson, 1988, p. 34).
Armstrong,
along with a couple of male assistant administrators and a faculty comprised of
white female missionaries, taught the future teachers of Southern black
children that hard toil and compliant behavior were the habits that could build
character and, thus, help to mitigate the moral defects that had been passed
down to them as a result of their uniquely-inferior race (Anderson, 1988). Armstrong’s vision to instill in the children
of freed slaves a lasting dedication to labor and self-sacrifice attracted the
financial support of wealthy Northern politicians and philanthropists who were
eagerly looking for a solution to what they termed the “Negro problem”
(Anderson, 1988, p. 72). With almost four million former slaves that
outnumbered whites in some regions of the South, it was of paramount importance
that African Americans appreciate their role in rebuilding the Southern
economy, while understanding the utter folly of aspirations for social
equality. Armstrong and his white
philanthropist backers hoped that black children would grow up and help rebuild
the cotton and tobacco industries that had been destroyed in the war of
Emancipation.
With
“Negrophobia” (Anderson, 1988, p. 68) at a high point following the end of the
War, it was essential, Armstrong believed, that African-American youngsters
learn the appropriate work behaviors and character habits that would make them
assets in reestablishing the Southern agricultural economy, which supplied
materials for the textile industries and manufacturing economies of the
North.
The
education that black students received at Hampton and the schools that came to
emulate Hampton celebrated the dignity of hard toil as the most viable way
students could overcome their moral inferiority, which black students were
taught to accept as the unalterable clasp that bound them together as children
of African lineage. Only twenty percent
of students that began school at Hampton worked hard enough and remained
compliant enough to earn a certificate at the end of the 2-3 year rigidly
controlled program that focused more on work habits than on book learning.
The new black
teachers who had survived their Hampton preparation became the carriers of
industrial education ideology that espoused the belief that responsible black
citizens must shun civic involvement such as voting and race mixing, as their
cultural backgrounds and moral failings had left them unprepared and unfit to
do either. Many left Hampton believing,
as they were told by their social studies teacher, Thomas J. Jones, that
slavery had, indeed, provided the basis for their salvation, for without it,
they could never have been converted to Christianity or educated properly, for
that matter.
Armstrong’s
Hampton Model of industrial education came to embody a systematic method to
indoctrinate and pacify the freed black population, which was clamoring for
that magical thing called education.
Freed slaves, educated according to the Hampton Model, offered a
renewable stream of cheap and dependable laborers who could be counted upon to
embrace their destiny to “ plow, hoe, ditch, and grub” (Anderson, 1988, p. 48)
without protest, agitation, or workplace demands.
Black
workers trained to embrace the “dignity of labor” would humbly seek redemption
and acceptance for their shortcomings through their unwavering commitment to
achieve what powerful white men determined as the necessary knowledge that
would purportedly serve to liberate those who remained steadfast in their
efforts. In short, Hampton students were
taught everything that was necessary to make them entirely complicit in their
own subjugation (Anderson, 1988).
Despite rejection by many black citizens, the
black press, and leading intellectuals like W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Morehouse,
and Malcolm MacVicar, the Hampton Model was fully embraced by a Who’s Who of
leading politicians and Northern philanthropists. Rutherford B. Hayes, James Eastman, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Andrew Carnegie were just a few of the progressives who viewed the
Hampton Model as the solution to the “Negro Problem,” (Anderson, 1988, p. 72),
and growing political and financial support for Hampton led to the subsequent
founding of the Tuskegee Institute, headed by the Hampton-educated former
slave, Booker T. Washington.
By the end of the 19th Century,
industrial training schools were promoted among white elites as the most
suitable education for African-American, Hispanic, and Native-American students
in the South and the North. Hampton’s
most famous alumnus, Booker T. Washington, became the leading black educator
and proponent for the Hampton Model after he was put in charge of the new
Tuskegee Institute in 1881. By 1895
Washington was the leading black spokesman for continuing social apartheid and
an incremental approach to civil rights, social concepts that reflected what
Washington had learned at Hampton from white Northern teachers.
Having
been taught that African-Americans had centuries to make up in terms of moral
and cultural development before they could ever expect social or political equality,
Washington argued that racial discrimination could only be remedied by earning
the respect that would surely come to those blacks who, 1) persisted in working
hard at whatever job was offered, and 2) exhibited character traits that would
eventually overcome a host of moral and character weaknesses. The story of this largely ignored and dark
chapter of our educational history is chronicled in James Anderson’s compelling
book, The education of Blacks in the
South: 1860-1935.
When Samuel Armstrong died in 1893, Hampton
chaplain and Yale graduate, Hollis Frissell, was named principal and remained
so until his death in 1917. With the
backing of philanthropist and head of Hampton’s Board of Trustees, Robert Ogden,
Frissell widely promoted industrial education based on character training and
hard manual labor. Ogden and other
philanthropists like George Peabody believed that the health of the economy,
particularly in the South, depended upon the labor of black men and women, and
they sought to promote an educational model that would “attach the Negro to the
[Southern] soil and prevent his exodus from the country to the city” (Anderson,
quoting Ogden, 1988, p. 89).
The New
York Times reported November 14, 1898 that Dr. Frissell, accompanied by
Ogden, had been in Manhattan raising money for Hampton scholarships. Accompanied by a black student quartet
singing “old plantation melodies with pleasing effect,” Frissell shared his new
stereopticon presentation of life among Hampton students learning to become
compliant teachers who would take the industrial education philosophy and
practices to black communities across the South: “Most of our pupils prefer to
do missionary work among their own people. They do not go north to seek their
own fortunes, but go out through the South to help uplift their friends. The work is often attended with great
difficulty to them, but they endure it willingly for the sake of the good they
can do” (New York Times, 1898).
Had it not been for staunch resistance from
black intellectuals and religious leaders, the industrial training school model
would have had an even deeper impact than it did on the education of
African-Americans in the decades just before and after the turn of the 20th
Century. In a 1903 essay entitled “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” W.
E. B. Dubois (1903) offered this damning assessment of the industrial education
model:
Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the
old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar
time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic
development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast,
becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost
completely to overshadow the higher aims of life (chapter 3, para 15).
By
1905, white Northern neo-abolitionists were finally awakened to the ugly
realities of the black industrial education model (Anderson, 1988), and
resistance to it grew so that Hampton’s methods and curriculum were finally
updated after Frissell’s death in 1917.
As it turned out, the philanthropists’ public relations machine and the
white press could not contain the public debate between Hampton acolyte Booker
T. Washington and Harvard sociologist, W.E.B. Dubois.
Dubois’
stinging critique of the Hampton Model became a rallying cry that reminded
black and white citizens, alike, how black men and women might interact with
the world when they are not trained for subservience and compliance. As it turned out, however, it was Booker T.
Washington’s racial accomodationist philosophy that prevailed for the first
half of the 20th Century.
Trained as he was at Hampton to remain dependable, compliant, hard
working, and of sound character, Washington represented the apotheosis of
blackness for the vast majority of white elites and policymakers for
generations that extended beyond the Civil Rights Era that began with Brown v.
Board of Education.
While
Dubois’ insistence on equal educational opportunity for black citizens carried
a great deal of weight among African-American intellectuals and the black
press, we need to remember that it was the dogged determination of local
educators and black parents who led the successful resistance against the white
philanthropists’ educational solution to the “Negro problem.” And even though educational equality remained
elusive, the curriculum and instructional methods used in the black schools
that black citizens helped helped build and fund focused most often on the same
knowledge and values dominant in the white schools.
By
the second decade of the 20th Century, the industrial schooling of
the Hampton Model that white philanthropists envisioned for black children came
to be understood for what it was: an exploitative and racist indoctrination
that served principally the needs of white landowners, northern industrialists,
and politicians determined to maintain racial segregation.
References
Anderson,
J. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903).
The souls of black folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.;
Bartleby.com, 1999. Retrieved from www.bartleby.com/114/
Faulkner,
W. (1951). Requiem
for a nun. New York: Random House.
New York Times. (1898, November 14). To aid Hampton Institute: Dr. Frissell, the
principal, explains the work for colored people and Indians at a church
meeting. New York Times. Retrieved
from http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1898/11/14/102127757.html?pageNumber=2
Chapter 1
The
New Gospel of “Work and Money”
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. --Erich Fromm (1955).
Just
over a hundred years after Dubois’s withering criticism of the educational
indoctrination that Washington absorbed at Hampton, the evidence that
"Work and Money" have supplanted other "higher aims of
life" is even more compelling than it was during America's first Gilded
Age. In no venue is it more evident than
in the No Excuses KIPP schools that many other charter schools and urban public
schools have come to imitate.
The
KIPP Model offers a mixture of academic and character education, which KIPP
co-founder Mike Feinberg explained to a Tulane University audience in 2011:
“KIPP teachers believe their job is to teach 49 percent academics and 51
percent character” (Morris, 2011). KIPP schools operate within total compliance
environments that are intensely segregated, with inexperienced and mostly white
middle class teachers exacting a brand of strict discipline, long school hours, and
more hours of homework.
We can only
wonder what resistors of the Hampton Model like Dubois, MacVicar, and Morgan
would say today about the KIPP Model, which purports to prepare all of its
students for college, even though just half of 5th graders who begin
at KIPP schools finish 8th grade
at KIPP schools (Miron, Urshel, & Saxton,
2011; Horn, 2010)—and only a third of 8th grade completers graduate
from college.
The
Hampton Model died a slow death, with Northern philanthropists clinging to it
up through the 1930s by repeated attempts to impose school
programs that focused on producing black workers with basic literacy
competencies and strict character training (Anderson, 1988). We are not
suggesting in this book that the KIPP Model and the Hampton Model are on the
same level in terms of severity, outcomes, or overt racism. To do so would be to ignore the progress in
the area of civil rights since the late 19th Century.
We
do, however, find distinct vestiges of the Hampton Model in KIPP’s ideological
grounding, rationale, punitive methods, teacher characteristics, and financial
support structure. Indeed, the tenacious
enthusiasms among white power elites and the mass media today harken back to
days when the Hampton Model was viewed as the solution to the “Negro
problem.” Echoes of the Hampton message
that can still be heard in schools that use the KIPP Model will become clearer
in the coming chapters.
Private and Public Support for the KIPP
Model
KIPP's
corporate chain of charter schools has been touted by the Philanthropy
Roundtable as “the most recognizable brand name in
contemporary American schooling” (Levenick, 2010), thanks in large part
to the deep and ongoing financial support from federal grants, corporate
foundation sources, and venture philanthropists (Horn & Libby, 2010) that
provide financial advantages to KIPP and other charters that public schools are unable
to match. For instance, researchers
(Miron, Urschel, & Saxton, 2011) found that KIPP schools collected over a
third more in revenue from public and private sources than public schools in
the same districts: “Combining public and private sources of revenue, KIPP
received, on average, $18,491 per pupil in 2007-08 . . . . $6,500 more per
pupil than what the local school districts received in revenues” (p. ii).
The
floodgates of corporate donations for charter construction, renovation, and
program funding opened in 2000, when a little-understood law sailed through
Congress in December 2000 and was signed by President Bill Clinton before
leaving office. The Community Renewal
Tax Relief Act included a provision known as the New Markets Tax Credit, and it
incentivized new levels of giving (Rawls, 2013) for businesses, both non-profit
and for-profit, in high poverty areas:
. .
.banks and equity funds that invest in charter schools and other projects in
underserved areas can take advantage of a very generous tax credit – as much as
39% -- to help offset their expenditure in such projects. In essence, that
credit amounts to doubling the amount of money they have invested within just
seven years. Moreover, they are allowed to combine
that tax credit with job creation credits and other types of credit, as well
collect interest payments on the money they are lending out – all of which can
add up to far more than double in returns (para 11).
Since
2001, then, billions of dollars have passed from venture philanthropists and
philanthrocapitalists through equity bundlers, bond investors, and hedge funds
into charter management organizations.
Hundreds of millions of those dollars have made KIPP the most prominent
and well-funded corporate education solution (Horn & Libby, 2010) for the
disenfranchised urban poor. The Doris
and Donald Fisher Fund, alone, gave over $90 million to the KIPP Foundation
between 2001 and 2013, while investing heavily, as well, in KIPP’s corporate
feeder system for teachers and principals, Teach for America (TFA) (Levenick,
2010).
The financial backing from the Fisher
family is emblematic of the philosophy of support for KIPP by its largest
corporate foundation donors. The Walton
Foundation has provided more than $60 million in grants, and the Gates
Foundation has given over $20 million in grants to the KIPP Foundation and to
individual KIPP schools. The Gates
Foundation, too, has underwritten over $60 million in KIPP loan guarantees to
various KIPP school networks (Banjo, 2009).
Clothing magnate and Gap
founder, Don Fisher, who was Chairman of the Board of the KIPP Foundation when
he died in 2009, expressed his conviction that “education is a business” and a
school is “not much different from a Gap store” (Duxbury, 2008). Scott Hamilton, Fisher’s point man for his
educational venture philanthropy and the person responsible for bringing KIPP
to Fisher’s attention as the kind of “scalable” education project he was
looking for, told Philanthropy Magazine (Levenick,
2010) that “Don treated KIPP and his philanthropic
efforts the same creative and rigorous way he did his clothing business…and
during our years of working together, KIPP in particular became like his second
Gap” (para 12).
With Fisher’s $15 million initial donation in
2000 to establish the KIPP Foundation, KIPP gained the resources to become a
prominent national player in the growing charter school market. That same year, the Republican National
Committee provided national attention, when KIPP students (KIPPsters) performed
a skit during TV prime time at the RNC Convention.
Until then, founders David Levin and Mike
Feinberg had parlayed financial support from wherever they could find it,
including an eccentric Houston furniture dealer, Jim McIngvale, who was widely
known from his TV commercials as "Mattress Mack" (Mathews, 2008).
Since 2000, however, KIPP has enjoyed lavish support from philanthropists,
corporate foundations, the federal government, and Wall Street hedge funds
(Gabriel & Medina, 2010).
Vast investments are funneled each year through
non-profit entities to carry out a persistent public relations campaign and to
provide the monetary infrastructure for sustaining
and growing the KIPP enterprise. In 2015, KIPP had 183 schools and 70,000
students in 20 states, with plans to double the number of students by
2019. Below is a list of the largest
KIPP Foundation (2015a) donors from 2000 to 2014:
$60,000,000 and Above
Doris
& Donald Fisher Fund
Walton
Family Foundation
$10,000,000-$24,999,999
Atlantic
Philanthropies
Broad
Foundation
Michael
and Susan Dell Foundation
Robertson
Foundation
$5,000,000-$9,999,999
Anonymous
Accenture
Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation
Citi
Foundation
Thomas
and Susan Dunn
Jack Kent
Cooke Foundation
Karsh
Family Foundation
New
Profit, Inc.
Rainwater
Charitable Foundation
Arthur
Rock and Toni Rembe
$1,000,000–$4,999,999
Anonymous (2)
Philippe and Debbie Dauman
Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin
Marcus Foundation
Miles Family Foundation
$500,000–999,999
Anonymous (2)
John and Laura Fisher
Morgridge Family Foundation
Maximilian Stone
U.S. Department of Education
$100,000–$499,999
Abrams Foundation
Gordon T. Bell
The Big D. Foundation
Steven and Marilyn Casper
Ben Chereskin
Kelly Coffey
Robert and Elizabeth Fisher
William and Sakurako Fisher
The G.R. Harsh IV & M.C. Whitman Charitable
Foundation
Leon Lowenstein Foundation
The McCance Foundation Trust
John and Hee-Jung Moon
Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin Foundation
Seed the Dream Foundation
Select Equity Group, Inc.
Stephen Jr. and Susan Mandel
Susquehanna Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
$50,000_–$99,999
Anonymous
Mr. and Mrs. John D. Baker, II
Jim and Connie Calaway
Gary Chartrand
Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York
David Goldberg and Sheryl Sandberg
Gurley Family Fund
Hellman Family Foundation
JaMel and Tom Perkins Family Foundation
The Jay Pritzker Foundation
The JPMorgan Chase Foundation
The Katzman Family Fund
Jeffrey and Linda Kofsky
Heidi Lynch and Daniel Greenstone
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Elizabeth McLaughlin
Orinoco
Palm, Inc. Corporate Headquarters
Stephen and Deborah Quazzo
Thompson Family Foundation
Federal
support for KIPP increased dramatically after the election of President Barack
Obama and his appointment of Secretary of Education. Between 2009 and 2012, the federal portion of
KIPP’s funding increased from two percent to 21 percent. With experience as Chicago Public Schools’ CEO
from 2001 to 2008, Duncan’s energetic support of corporate education reform
initiatives was already well-established when he arrived in Washington. In September 2010, KIPP received grants worth
$10 million from the U. S. Department of Education, and in December 2010 KIPP
and TFA each was awarded $50 million (Dillon, 2010) in “Investing in
Innovation” grants.
KIPP
DC received a Race to the Top district grant of $10 million in 2012 (Brown,
2102). The U. S. DOE gave another $9.4
million in 2011 (U. S. Department of Education, 2011), and in October 2014, the
KIPP Foundation and KIPP regional networks received $13.8 million from the U.
S. Department of Education’s Charter School Program (CSP). The KIPP Foundation’s IRS filings in 2011
show federal grants totaled almost $50 million, even though 70 percent of
KIPP’s income in 2011 came from private contributions.
This
represented for the KIPP Foundation a 100.5 percent increase in revenue in a
single year and 288% increase over the 2008 total. During the four-year span (2008-2011), KIPP
Foundation receipts went from $17.5 million to $49.2 million per year. Between 2007 and 2011, the KIPP Foundation
reported to the IRS that it took in $157,948,811 in donations and philanthropic
investments.
These
impressive totals do not take into account the money received in public
per-pupil state education funds. In 2015, KIPP had 70,000 students in 183
schools. Based on a conservative
estimate of $8,000 per student from state funds, KIPP schools would take in
$560 million each year in state funding, alone.
With generous support from both corporate and governmental sources,
evidence abounds that the KIPP Foundation is flush with a decade after its
founding. The venture philanthropists’
newsletter, Nonprofit investor, rated
KIPP a “Buy” in 2012 for individual and corporate funders looking for a good
bet on their philanthropic investments.
The
philanthropic investments by corporations and their foundations in the KIPP Model
schools serve a number of important functions for givers, some of which are
more visible than other. Beyond the
obvious and substantial reductions in individual and corporate tax obligations
that accompanies charitable giving, there is the public relations benefit that
accrues for philanthrocapitalists who embark on ventures that are viewed as
public-minded and generous to the oppressed and disadvantaged. This remains true for Walton, Gates, and the
Broad foundations, among others, as well as for Fisher family enterprises.
Less
obvious are the benefits emanating from the ongoing corporate crusade to spread
business efficiencies that will drive down the cost of public services. The spread of the long-held belief that
market models will improve educational and behavioral outcomes while saving
money remains a prime motivator for corporate support of KIPP Model
schools. In addition, the
entrepreneurial rationale and methods undergirding charters translates into reduction
of public oversight, increase in private management, and the shrinkage of
employee protections/benefits.
These
less obvious corporate benefits were not invisible to some of the former KIPP
teachers interviewed for this book. At
the end of our conversation, one teacher expressed her concern that the civil
and human rights rhetoric by KIPP’s corporate supporters was being used to mask
exploitative management and labor practices:
I guess
the one thing that kind of just rubbed me the wrong way and maybe I’m too
idealistic about the whole thing—but for an organization [KIPP] supposedly
committed to addressing some of the negative effects of poverty, I always found
it curious that the organization relied so much on from The Gap
organization. Gap has a pretty atrocious
record when it comes to sweatshop labor and human rights violations around the
world. And they [the Fishers] all sit on
the Board, and so to me it seems like there’s a definite corporate agenda
behind the organization. That’s okay for
sort of the bandage wound that they’re putting on educational inequality and
poverty in general, but there’s no addressing of the system as a whole and some
of the systematic failures that exist in urban education. Because frankly and honestly, for our school
to have functioned well we probably would have needed at least six trained
counselors. And plenty of other social
services for these children, but no one wants to talk about that.
Even
if KIPP’s original corporate patron, Donald Fisher, viewed schools as “not much
different from a GAP store,” former teachers interviewed for this book view the
sweatshop conditions at KIPP as unsustainable for any significant duration:
It
[teaching at KIPP] was ultimately unsustainable. It felt like sprinting a marathon for two
years. I probably worked somewhere
between 80 and 100 hours every single week for two years and that’s
unsustainable, even for somebody who didn’t have a family. . . .The money was
fine. I had no chance to spend it. I was literally at school from 6:00 in the
morning until 9:00 at night six days a week, and then working on Sundays as
well. It was extremely unsustainable
from the time perspective. The second
piece, the second part of that answer I think, comes not just from the hours,
but the intensity of the hours. It
wasn’t just working on being at the office or something like that. It was we had to create and own an
environment that was difficult to manage, and had to do that over a very long
period.
Pillars,
Underpinnings, and Ideological Load
While KIPP’s financial foundation was solidified
after 2000 with grants that yielded large tax breaks for donors,
the charter chain had already captured the attention of power elites some years
earlier. We find out from Jay Mathews’
(2009a) Work hard, be nice
that KIPP’s media coming out party took the form of a 2,799-word story in
1994 on the front page of the Houston
Post. Mathews offers no details as
to how an obscure little program in its first year with 47 students was chosen
for such coverage, but we know that KIPP’s sister organization, Teach for
America (TFA), had built an impressive network of corporate funders by
1994. We know, in fact, that TFA’s first
big media splash in 1990 had resulted after corporate donors wrote to media
outlets requesting that reporters be sent out to do a story on Wendy Kopp’s new
venture (Kopp, 2003).
Nor does the Mathews book tell us how KIPP
co-founder, David Levin, who in 1995 was a third year teacher from TFA without
credentials, found support from the Giuliani Administration for opening the
second KIPP school in New York City. How
did this unknown and uncertified educational neophyte land a New York City
teaching position with multiple classrooms and support staff in a public school
building in The Bronx? There, Levin
would work out the kinks of the KIPP School Model, as Mike Feinberg was doing
the same at the original KIPP Academy Middle School in Houston.
Mike Feinberg and David Levin were recent
graduates of Yale and University of Pennsylvania, respectively, when they
launched KIPP near the end of their two-year stint with Teach for America (TFA)
(Horn, 2010; Ellison, 2012). The story of KIPP’s founders has been frequently
repeated in popular media and chronicled in Jay Mathew’s (2009) celebratory
book, and it has now entered into the canon of entrepreneurial folktales with
other famous business success stories, such as Google’s genesis in a garage in
Silicon Valley (Ellison, 2012).
In the Mathews account of the KIPP founders
(Horn, 2009), Levin and Feinberg returned to their apartment one evening in
1994, following an inspirational speech by famed teacher, Rafe Esquith, whose
classroom mottoes of “be nice, work hard” and “there are no shortcuts” would
subsequently find prominent placement among the festoons and placards in KIPP
classrooms. Borrowing from Esquith’s “no shortcuts” approach but leaving behind
his casual warmth and humane connectedness, Feinberg and Levin created a total
compliance version of the traditional classroom.
The KIPP Model applies a psychological/character
intervention program that is sustained by pedagogical machismo mixed with No
Excuses authoritarianism. The young
founders also borrowed heavily from the inimitable Harriet Ball from Houston,
whose teaching style offered a culturally-sensitive mash-up of gospel, hip-hop,
and rhyming that, one suspects, loses some of its charm in the hands of the
white, middle class TFA enlistees that KIPP depends upon for 30-40 percent of
its teachers.
It was one of Harriet Ball’s chants, as Mathews
(2009a) recalls, that inspired the name, Knowledge is Power Program:
You
gotta read, baby, read.
You
gotta read, baby, read.
The
more you read, the more you know,
Cause
knowledge is power,
Power
is money, and
I want
it (p. 62).
Despite
the many hours that Jay Mathews (2009a) spent visiting the No Excuses KIPP
schools during the writing Work hard, be
nice…, there were most likely some disturbing realities for which Mathews
remained unaware, such as problem children being sent to the school basement
when important visitors were on campus (see Chapter 8). Nor was he likely aware of the practice of
forcing 100 new fifth graders to sit on the floor for days until they learn to
follow orders and respect the rules (See Chapter 2).
Other
troubling facts he does report in his book, and whether of minor of major
significance, Mathews recounts them with neither concern nor apparent
alarm. As for incidents that may simply
raise eyebrows, perhaps, we learn from Mathews that KIPP principals, or “school
leaders,” view school recess as a “prime distraction,” and that field trips are
commonly referred to as “field lessons” aimed to produce more grist for the
learning mill that grinds on when recreation might, otherwise, intrude.
And
then there are the scarier events that Mathews reports with no evident concern,
including the time when KIPP founders, David Levin and Mike Feinberg loaded
school children into a closed, windowless U-Haul trailer to take them on a
local “field lesson” in Houston. More
troubling, still, is the incident that Mathews recalls in a tone more
appropriate for reporting on a youthful prank, when Feinberg once smashed a
plate glass school window with a chair, while in a rage that his Houston KIPP
students did not show the proper contrition for the admitted offense of having
talked during a video lesson (Horn, 2010).
According to the oft-repeated story by Levin and
Feinberg, the founding pair had stayed up the entire night after the Rafe
Esquith presentation, listening to a repeating loop of U2’s Achtung Baby, while collaborating on
what came to be the Five Pillars of the KIPP Model school: high expectations,
choice and commitment, more time, power to lead, and focus on results (KIPP,
2015b). Levin and Feinberg had been sent
to Houston during their TFA assignments, where they experienced many of the
same frustrations of beginning teachers in urban schools with high levels of
poverty and low levels of achievement on standardized tests.
The Five Pillars were meant to address four
issues plaguing public schools. The
first issue Levin and Feinberg identified was a lack of time for the
intensive instruction that they felt struggling students require to catch up to
their peers (Ellison, 2012). They
believed that longer school days and school years were first necessary steps to
raising academic achievement. The second
issue relates to the academic malaise common in poor urban schools that
Feinberg and Levin attributed to low expectations. For Levin and
Feinberg, the low expectations of both teachers and administrators for their
students become self-fulfilling prophecies that foster an institutional culture
of academic failure.
The third issue stems from the bureaucratic nature
of large public schools systems. Based on their TFA indoctrination, Feinberg
and Levin believed that teachers’ unions put the interests of their adults
before the needs of students and that the university teacher preparation
programs block talented young people from entering the teaching
profession. Feinberg and Levin became
convinced that institutional constraints placed on school principals and
teachers made public schools structurally unable to bring about the kind of
reforms necessary to raise student test scores and close the achievement gap.
The fourth issue, which Feinberg and Levin
identify as compulsion to attend public schools, is due, they contend,
to a lack of educational choices available to students and parents. Levin and
Feinberg came to believe that these four issues create a situation whereby
academic failure becomes a predictable conclusion, and they developed the
non-negotiable pillars to support an ideological blueprint they had acquired as
Teach for America enlistees: entrepreneurship, commitment, innovation, and
leadership can overcome the achievement gap when applied in environments where
issues of time, low expectations, bureaucracy, and compulsion have been
neutralized (Ellison, 2012).
The KIPP Model holds students to high
expectations, and it requires teachers to foster high expectations in their
classrooms. KIPP emphasizes that KIPP
stakeholders (students, parents, and teachers) are there by choice and must
make a commitment to meeting the high expectations of the school, with each
party required to sign a non-negotiable contract to that effect. The KIPP model
extends the school day, week, and year.
The typical KIPP school day begins instruction
at 7:30 and ends at 5:00, and two to three hours of homework are added on top
of that. KIPP students are also expected
to attend school every other Saturday from 8:00 to 12:30 and to attend three
weeks of full instruction during the summer. Altogether, the average KIPP
student spends around 60% more time in school than do their peers in
traditional public schools (Mathews, 2009a).
Principals, who are known as CEOs or “school
leaders,” are expected to be embody an entrepreneurial spirit while maintaining
total control over budgetary, program, and personnel decisions. Finally, the KIPP Model is built around a
commitment to producing high scores on standardized tests and “other objective
measures” as the way for KIPP students
“to succeed at the nation’s best high schools and colleges.” According to the KIPP’s website, twenty years
after that fateful evening in 1994 the KIPP Model now, as then, is intended to
foster a school “culture of high expectations” based on “clearly defined and
measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that makes
no excuses based on the students’ background” (KIPP, 2015b).
The effects of operationalizing the No Excuses
ideology for students and teachers within the KIPP schools comes out clearly in
the accounts of former KIPP teachers interviewed for this book. Their accounts are interspersed throughout
the book, for reasons that include consideration for readers’ capacities to
absorb the psychological brutality and physical stresses that characterize KIPP
teacher experiences. One teacher who was
able to revisit some of her painful personal sacrifices during her years at
KIPP offered some disturbing insights regarding the repercussions of the No
Excuses credo in practice.
When asked why she stayed at KIPP, this teacher
pointed to how school leaders had convinced her and many of her fellow teachers
of their unique importance to the children and how their work at KIPP was
saving children who, otherwise, would be lost to the public bureaucracies that
operated for the benefit of adults, not children. As a result, she committed herself to
carrying out the mission, regardless of what it took and regardless of personal
consequences.
She noted that a mutual lifeboat mentality among
the teachers helps create a camaraderie among “team and family,” which enables
levels of self sacrifice that remain somewhat mysterious to those who are on
the outside. The following teacher’s
understanding of the phenomenon only took hold when her life was put in
jeopardy by refusing to accept her own physical limits in upholding the demand
imposed by No Excuses code:
I think that there is an expectation where you don’t want to
let anyone down at KIPP. They [KIPP
leaders] are constantly telling you how important you are and how important
this work is, and how you’re saving all these children. And then you do find yourself thinking, oh my
God, what am I doing? You’re watching
teachers drop left and right. I mean I’m
stronger than most because I was experienced, but I’m sitting there watching
new teachers literally have—I’ve seen about four teachers have complete nervous
breakdowns.
And then you find yourself asking, why am I
doing this? And it’s basically because I
think something kicks in where you don’t want to disappoint. You become almost catatonic. You just keep doing it over and over and
over, and it’s like you keep telling yourself I’ve got to stop. I’ve got to stop this. I got to stop this.
And then before you know it, you’re in
there a year, you’re in there two years.
And after two years you’re considered like a veteran teacher at
KIPP. Then, finally, I just had to stop. I mean you become physically ill. Your body breaks down—you can’t take it
anymore. I fell asleep one day driving
home from work, and I hit a car in front of me.
That’s when I woke up, and I was like, okay, this is enough. My family’s begging me to quit. They’re begging me to stop. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? So finally you have to start answering to
other people because they notice, and that’s when I decided to stop. It’s enough.
Predictably,
this kind of distress contributes to many teachers like this one eventually
leaving KIPP. When I asked her what it
was like when she left KIPP, she had this to say:
Heaven, if there is one.
It was like for the first time I got to sleep. My body started to repair itself. I noticed that my mind was clearing up. I was being able to communicate effectively.
I can’t explain what your body does. It
shuts down—your body shuts down. You
just become like a robot. It took me a
good six months . . . to recover from that experience. And after six months I found myself like
enjoying life again because it was absolutely miserable for two years. I was not a happy person.
When I asked
another teacher how she understood the KIPP concept of unity expressed in “team
and family,” she said that she had been encouraged to use “that terminology,
even though she said her experiences at KIPP were more akin to being “part of a very abusive, dysfunctional family.”
Fanciful
Goals and Dangerous Assumptions
A significant component of the ideological
mortar that built the Five Pillars is based on a late
20th Century education reform assumption that schools and teachers
could “reduce inequality in educational achievement
if disadvantaged students were held to the same high standards as everybody
else” (Cohen, 1996, p. 101). This belief
was foundational to the testing accountability movement that took hold in the
United States following the publication of
A Nation at Risk (ANAR) in 1983.
The language adopted by ANAR initiated the media meme that the urban
public schools do not promote learning and that children’s achievement is low
because public school teachers in poor urban schools believe that children
living in poverty cannot perform at the same levels as privileged children. The
prior focus on education funding initiatives to mitigate poverty during the
1960s and 1970s was transformed by the late 1980s to a focus on school and
teacher quality and accountability as keys to student achievement.
Two privileged and ambitious young men like
Feinberg and Levin who came of age during an era that accepted President
Reagan’s belief that “government is not the solution to our problem; government
is the problem,” were surely not immune to the rhetorical jiu-jitsu by
reformist policymakers in education focused on “choice.” These advocates for privatization enjoyed
success in shifting attention from the tangible effects of child poverty and
discrimination in schooling to a kind of brutal, alarmist rhetoric that blamed
society’s shortcomings on the public institutions that had been previously
established and maintained to mitigate some of those problems.
If the kinds of market-based solutions to which
education reformers and the KIPP founders subscribed were to gain any traction,
then the perception of the problem had to altered so that the preferred market
solutions could fit. The result was the
beginning of an education policy era that culminated with the creation of
public policy that would assure the widespread public failure required for
market solutions to gain some degree of public acceptance. The fact that
three-quarters of American children (Anderson, 2011) failed to achieve the
fanciful No Child Left Behind mandate of 100 percent reading and math
proficiency ten years after NCLB passage has not deterred continuing
enthusiasms for similarly unachievable targets among the corporate foundations
that determine federal and state
education policies.
Billed as an antidote to No Child Left Behind’s
impossible proficiency targets (100 percent proficiency by 2014), a federal
waiver program was devised in 2011 that demanded what some states, including
Vermont, considered equally onerous accountability demands for seeking relief
from the NCLB proficiency sword. Rather than trade one monstrous system for
another that offered more punishing sanctions for low scoring high poverty
schools, Vermont stuck with the impossible NCLB mandates.
As predicted by every testing authority in the
U. S., the state’s Secretary of Education, Rebecca Holcombe (Holcombe, 2014)
announced in a memorandum to parents and caregivers in August 2014 that, based
on federal accountability rules, all
Vermont public schools in the state were “low performing,” with the exception
of eight schools that did not take the state tests in 2014. To draw attention
to the ludicrous nature of the manufactured dilemma, Holcombe’s memo also noted
that a national media firm had ranked Vermont schools third in the nation in
overall quality the same week that the federal failure was formally
acknowledged. Earlier in 2014, Education Week’s annual report card had
ranked Vermont schools 7th in the nation for overall quality (Education
Week, 2014).
While there remains some question as to the
percentage of public school personnel who still share in the fanciful myth that
all children, regardless of conditions, will achieve the same results on
standardized tests, there is less uncertainty about the important role of
factors outside the school that
influence the academic performance of children in school. We know that
. . . teacher effectiveness constitutes the most important school-based factor to variations in test score achievement (Goldhaber, Liddle, Theobald, & Walch, 2010), with the exact percentage dependent
upon the methodology used.
Goldhaber (2002), for instance, found that teacher characteristics account for 8.5% of the “variation
in student achievement” (para 8), while analyses by Nye and her colleagues (Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004) found among 17 studies that “7% to 21% of the variance
in achievement gains is associated with variation in teacher effectiveness” (p. 240). What we know, too, is that that other factors have much more influence on student achievement variations
than do teachers. Goldhaber and
his colleagues (Goldhaber, 2002) have found that additional factors involving family background,
peer composition, and other social capital influences make up 60% of the
variance in student test scores (Horn & Wilburn, 2013, p. 77).
Since James
Coleman’s (1966) groundbreaking research findings were presented and largely
ignored, we have known that “most of the variability in student achievement
overall . . . is associated with students (and their families and communities),
not the schools they attend” (Rumberger & Palardy, 2005, p. 2023). Even so, there are certain characteristics of
schools that may further hinder the limited influence that schools and teachers
do have on student achievement. For
instance, Coleman scholar, Gerald Grant (2009), has noted that class and racial
isolation negatively affect student achievement:
Coleman found that the achievement of both poor and rich children was depressed by
attending a school where
most children came from low-income families. More important to the goal of achieving equal educational opportunity, he found that the achievement of poor children was raised by attending a predominantly middle-class school, while the achievement of affluent children in the school was not harmed. This was true even if per-pupil
expenditures were the same
at both schools. No research over
the past 40 years has overturned Coleman’s
finding. . . . (p. 159)
Some
factors that influence student achievement are attributable to both school and
community influences. Pupil attitude is
an example of this. Of all the school
influences, in fact, James Coleman (1966) found pupil attitude to have the
strongest relationship to student achievement: “a pupil attitude factor, which appears to have a stronger relationship to
achievement than do all the “school” factors
together, is the extent
to which an individual feels that he has some control over his own destiny”
(p. 23).
A sense of individual autonomy, then, is
linked to a sense of individual power to effect change in one’s life. Although this Coleman finding has been
largely ignored for decades, the effects of what may be termed an attitude of
hope are most significant in terms of student achievement:
The responses of pupils to questions in
the survey show that minority pupils, except
for Orientals, have far less conviction than Whites that they can affect their own environments and
futures. When they do, however, their achievement is higher than that of Whites who lack that conviction.
Furthermore, while this characteristic shows little relationship to most school factors, it is related, for Negroes, to the proportion
of Whites in the schools. Those Negroes in schools with a higher proportion of Whites have a greater sense of control. This finding suggests that the direction such an attitude takes may be associated with the pupil’s school
experience as well as the
experience in the larger
community (p. 23).
High
expectations, then, are embodied within a complex human social system that
cannot be boiled down to a set of imposed beliefs, regardless of how noble
or harsh or relentless the enforcement of those beliefs become,
or how much said beliefs claim the power to alter realities that remain immune,
nonetheless, to wishful thinking. While
high expectations are absolutely required to raise achievement, they are
entirely insufficient to complete the job.
To
promote the cynical fallacy that high expectations in schools, alone, hold the
key to the problem of low achievement among poor children leads to four
possible outcomes, all of them bad: 1)
it leads us away from the corrosive socioeconomic realities outside of school,
while pushing our attention toward blaming children or blaming schools and their
teachers, 2) it requires educators and children to subscribe to an ideology
that demands superhuman and/or unhealthy levels of anxiety and stress to
attain, even temporarily, 3) it leads to eventual failure to live up to
expectations that are more fanciful than reality-based, which
creates self-loathing or self-blame for failing to achieve the impossible, 4)
it leads to totalizing compliance methods in schools that look more penal than
pedagogical.
The enormous pressure to remain true to
distant, adult goals disconnected from sociological realities requires a
blinkered, autonomic acceptance to No Excuses and “by any means required.” To
substantiate the perverse fallacy that class, income, and race are unrelated to
children’s achievement scores, there arises a perverse permission to sacrifice
both teacher and student autonomy, safety, and health. The imposition of a No Excuses group order
leads to displacement of individual autonomy, even though it is autonomy that
provides the basis for “pupil attitudes” based on real hope, rather than a
manufactured optimism.
We know
that the achievement beliefs, or pupil attitudes, are shaped early in life
(Heyman, Dweck, & Cain, 1992), and the more often children experience the
common failure to live up to KIPP expectations, the harder it is for them to
believe in their own worth or in their capacity and potential to succeed. We know, too, from research that “increased
surveillance of students . . . and punishment-oriented responses to rule
infractions (e. g., push-outs, suspensions and expulsions) do little to create
a climate of academic success or teach students prosocial skills” (McEvoy &
Welker, 2000, p. 138).
We also
know that student confidence is undermined (Roesner, Eccles, & Sameroff,
1998) by organizational practices that are common at KIPP schools, which
emphasize competition, public awards, and rewards for “highest grades rather
than deep task engagement” (p. 325).
Research also tells us that achievement, motivation, and feelings of
well-being are enhanced where “authentic learning” or “cooperative learning”
(McEvoy & Welker, 2000, p. 138) practices are common, either of which are
uncommon in No Excuses schools.
Motivation,
achievement, and well-being are enhanced, as well, in schools where students engage
in “self-exploration and expression” and where caring teachers have emotionally
and academically supportive relationships with students (Roesner, Eccles, &
Sameroff, 1998, p. 326). From what
former teachers report, teachers at KIPP do not have the opportunity to develop
relationships with students, supportive or otherwise, and learning tasks are
laser focused on tests and preparing for tests.
A
number of former KIPP teachers felt that the laser focus on raising scores kept
them from being able to interact with students in effective ways. One teacher felt that the large class size of
thirty middle school students (ninety per day) created another barrier to
getting to know students: “not at all was I able to build a relationship with
them.” The expectations for teacher and
student behavior also created barriers to communication with students, as the
focus on silent compliance leaves little or no social space for getting to know
students. This same teacher found the
fixation on testing got in the way of teaching students how to interact with
one another, which did not allow students to learn important lessons about
social adaptation and empathy.
Some
teachers noted that KIPP’s absorption with total compliance demands for
procedure and behavior left little time for caring relationships, which created
a situation that encouraged a form of detached callousness that both teachers
and students reflect in the way they regard themselves and others. An
experienced teacher who resigned before the end of his first year at KIPP found
school leaders “treating the teachers as though they were 10th grade
children in terms of almost browbeating the teachers” and urging them toward an
abrasive militancy aligned with the classroom management expectations of the
KIPP Model. More will be said about this
in Chapter 4.
There is a deep, broad, and
long-established empirical basis for believing that Five Pillars may not
support KIPP’s ideological load and the expectations for disadvantaged students
that come with it. Whether we are using
4th grade standardized tests or college entrance exams, decades of
student achievement measures show strong correlations between family
income/wealth and standardized test results (see Figure 1.1). In fact, researchers (Orlich & Gifford,
2006; Orlich, 2007; Rampell, 2009) have found from .95 to .97 correlation
between family income and SAT and ACT test scores, which means that over 90
percent of the variance in college entrance test scores may be explained by
family income of the test takers (Orlich & Gifford, 2006, p. 1).
The same strong correlations between
socioeconomic status and test performance can be found, as well, in the
standardized tests that public school children are administered each year. In New Jersey, where District Factor Groups
(DFGs) are used to represent school districts’ socioeconomic status, six
factors are considered to arrive at DFG rankings, A-J, with “A” representing
the lowest SES and “J” the highest:
1) Percent of adults with no high school
diploma
2) Percent of adults with some college
education
3) Occupational status
4) Unemployment rate
5) Percent of individuals in poverty
6) Median family income (New Jersey Department
of Education, 2004).
Figure 1.2 shows 2001-2002 composite scores for
the three state tests administered in public schools: 1) Elementary School Proficiency Test (ESPA),
2) Grade Eight Proficiency Test (ESPA), and 3) High School Proficiency Test
(HSPA). In each test case and without exception, the average student
performance increases as one moves from poorest (A) to wealthiest (J)
districts.
Do pillars made of high expectations, choice and
commitment, more time, power to lead, and focus on results offer KIPP’s
supporters a legitimate excuse to declare “No Excuses,” especially when the
expected results are standardized test scores that are more precise measures of
house sizes in neighborhoods where tests are administered (Kohn, 2001) than
they are any reliable gauge of school quality or teacher/student commitment or
expectations? Does a laser focus on the Five
Pillars offer us an ethical pass to blot out from our consciousness and
conscience any consideration of economic disadvantage as we examine the faces
of malnourished, sleep-deprived, or traumatized children getting ready to take
the next big math test?
The KIPP Foundation and its political and
financial supporters would have us believe that there are, indeed, no excuses,
and that its programs prove as much. Are
they right, and if they are right, what are the economic and human costs and
benefits of such a program, and for whom?
The answers to these questions are teased out in
the following pages, but for now one thing is certain: by ignoring or denying
the effects of economic disadvantage, segregation, and school resources on
student achievement scores, corporate education reformers who support the KIPP
mission must push even harder to pressure KIPP personnel to corral and channel
the behaviors and attitudes of KIPP children whose lives, from the beginning,
have been shaped by the multiple effects of economic deprivation.
To
ignore the need to acknowledge and to alter those deprivations places an
intense focus and weight upon what happens inside the KIPP classroom to change
children so that they become, in effect, impervious to socioeconomic
disadvantage. The resulting cultural,
character, and behavioral compacting process, then, creates debilitating and
unsustainable pressures for teachers and students, alike. In the process of sustaining its ideology and
the irrational insistence that the most disadvantaged children will perform at
the same levels on standardized tests as the most advantaged, basic human needs
of children and teachers become regularly displaced, and many students and teachers,
alike, are sacrificed to the grinding KIPP crucible.
Parents of KIPP students whose own educational
experiences are likely to have been shaped, as well, by the many effects of
economic disadvantage, often misplace blame on their former teachers for not
having forced them to learn more when they were students in school. This rationalization provides, then, a
further impetus and permission for KIPP Model schools to use harsh measures to
extract total compliance and test scores that serve to burnish the brand.
The children who survive the harsh KIPP gauntlet
with high test scores intact serve to perpetuate the myth that teachers and
schools, alone, are responsible for differences in student achievement, even as
attrition is particularly high among first year KIPP students who must contend
this insistent claim. Mathematica, Inc.,
which was commissioned by KIPP (Nichols-Barrer, Gill, Gleason & Tuttle,
2014) to analyze KIPP’s enrollment and performance data, reported in 2014 that
KIPP’s attrition among fifth graders was almost one and half times higher at
KIPP (16%) than at public feeder schools (11%).
In pressing to make the exceptional the
perceived commonplace, the KIPP model stands at the forefront of a national
effort to disprove the need for alterations to the long-established
institutional and structural inequalities that sustain the
vast differences in educational, social, and economic achievement. Preferred by venture philanthropists and corporate
foundations are the cheaper and less disruptive educational
treatments that have the added benefit of creating new corporate revenue
streams and tax savings, all the while tightening the social steering
mechanisms within schools to further advantage the business
community.
The increasing prominence of standardized testing
since NCLB has opened new business
opportunities for testing and technology companies,
tutoring firms, and professional development consultants. With
the migration of high stakes standardized testing to online formats since
2013, hundreds of billions will have been required to
create the infrastructure to administer, transmit, analyze, and store massive amounts of
student and teacher data.
At the same time, the prominence of
TFA has helped to temporalize the teaching profession, and
the expansion of alternative certification schemes has reduced
teacher payrolls and weakened collective
bargaining. Too, the
proliferation of charter schools has shifted control of public education to
corporate boards, rather than elected officials.
The
belief that economically disadvantaged children will perform on standardized
tests at the same levels as privileged students provides a crusader dimension
to the KIPP mission and a
missionary impulse to both KIPP
to TFA. TFA promotional
materials used during college recruiting
visits (Veltri, 2010) state that inadequate public schools in high minority and
high poverty areas constitutes “our nation’s greatest injustice,” which can be
“solved” by becoming a TFA corps member.
Feinberg and Levin have used that TFA’s
missionary zeal to create a schooling environment and methodology to produce
test scores, at least for those students who survive the KIPP treatment, that
are used to justify the KIPP Model.
Large numbers of these children do not survive—sixty percent left
between 5th and 8th grade in a 2008 study conducted in
Bay Area KIPP Schools (Woodworth et al, 2008, p. ix). And in a later study
(Miron, Urschel, & Saxton, 2011), researchers similarly found that
“approximately 15% of the originally enrolled students disappear from the KIPP
cohort every year” (p. 12).
Helping,
too, to drive up scores for the remaining cohorts is the fact that KIPP leavers
are most often not replaced by new students, as they are in public schools that
must accept all students who walk through the door. Because they are not replaced, the test
scores of students at KIPP schools
are inflated and are not truly representative of
the original population of students.
The
implications of implementing a model of schooling based on KIPP’s core values
and ideological commitments are many, and they have proven hazardous to the
emotional, intellectual, and ethical well-being of many students and teachers,
alike, who have been indoctrinated and often discarded by a system that is
unforgiving in its ironclad “non-negotiables.”
During talks with the teachers who volunteered to be interviewed for
this book, we came to understand, in part at least, the rupture between KIPP
rhetoric and KIPP reality for those who work within the KIPP system.
The level of commitment required of teachers
and students assures that large numbers will not survive the KIPP
gauntlet. In the brave new world of
corporate schooling aimed to build gritty super kids, however, such losses have
become entirely unexceptional and forgotten by the survivors who must continue
to face the unrelenting demands of a system that assures one’s best is almost
never good enough. In a system where
teaching experience is often not required or even desired, new and
inexperienced teachers’ lack the knowledge or experience to challenge narrow
conceptions of learning that are enforced with brute methods.
KIPP’s
preference for psychological indoctrination to replace children’s developmental
learning needs and KIPP’s insensitivity to sociological and cultural contexts
provide a breeding ground for rationalizations and practices to become accepted
that, outside the KIPP bubble, would be considered hostile to the well-being of
children or tantamount to educational malpractice. There is a treacherous tipping point that
separates zealous commitment from cult-like blindness, where moral clarity and
educative purpose may become outweighed by relentless fixations on data,
chain-gang behavioral regimen, and foggy, futuristic abstractions (Brookfield, 2005,
p. 164) that place testing accountability ahead of conscience.
This
potential outcome is made more likely when market based education solutions
grounded by amoral capitalism are applied to public institutions that,
otherwise, demand deep moral commitments to the public good. The results, too
often, are lapses in professional behaviors and in the treatment of children at
KIPP that only become discussable after teachers leave KIPP (many examples are
shared in the following chapters).
One
example worth noting here is referenced in Jay Mathews’ chronicle of KIPP
founders Feinberg and Levin (Horn, 2009).
Even though public reports from visitors to KIPP have documented that
rule breakers were labeled (sometimes literally with signs) as “miscreants,”
Mathews (2009a) never makes note of these labeling practices other than to use
the label, himself, to describe a child who received a private tongue-lashing
for whispering on the first day of school.
The teacher reminds this “miscreant” that
you are too big for that kind of stuff. From now on, when a teacher is speaking, you
are going to track your eyes on the teacher and listen to what he or she is
saying. You are in KIPP now. It is time to grow up. I am expecting a lot from you” (p. 67).
Unfortunately
for the children of KIPP entering 5th grade who are
expected to “grow up,” the penalty for even the smallest infraction is clearly
demonstrated in various forms of harsh discipline, humiliation, isolation,
silencing, and public shaming.
Otherwise, pent-up energy is often burned off on a dizzying carousel of
chanting, singing, snapping, nodding, waving, and clapping in an exhibition of
mechanical unanimity by all “teammates.”
When
combined with long, silent hours at school and hours more of homework drudgery
after school, these practices resemble the same ones commonly used to
indoctrinate and maintain control within cults:
Keeping devotees constantly fatigued, deprived of sensory
input and suffering protein deprivation, working extremely long hours . . . in
cult-owned businesses, engaging in monotonous chanting and rhythmical singing,
may induce psychophysiological changes in the brain. The rhythmical movement of
the body can lead to altered states of consciousness, and changes in the
pressure or vibration pattern of the brain may affect the temporal lobe (Cath
quoted in Collins, 1982, para 33).
Without
the capacity or intent to change the social, economic, health, safety, and
housing conditions that influence KIPP students’ levels of achievement and
behaviors (or any other student, for that matter), KIPP teachers and those
embracing the KIPP Model must focus on changing the children, themselves, in
order to alter the educational outcomes as measured by performance character
grading and standardized tests.
In
short, education reform necessarily merges with thought reform, or coercive
persuasion, as defined by the Encyclopedia of Sociology as “programs of social influence capable of producing
substantial behavior and attitude change through the use of coercive tactics,
persuasion, and/or interpersonal and group-based influence manipulations”
(Schein 1961; Lifton 1961).
When the demand for changing student achievement and character
traits, or “performance character” (Tough, 2012), routinely ignores
sociological realities that shape human beings, then the pressure to control
these environmental elements demands ongoing psychological interventions.
More
will be said about these interventions in subsequent chapters. Now it is time to turn to the social theory and
practices that provide the deeper rationale for schools based on the KIPP
Model, where coercion, surveillance, and compliance embody the paternalistic
goals inherent in what has come to known as “broken windows theory.”
Broken Windows Theory and the New Paternalism
“Broken windows theory” adheres to the belief that social
order demands that any rule infraction or unlawful act, whether on city
streets, in homeless shelters, or in schools has to be met with strict
intervention and corrective measures. Beginning with Rudolph Giuliani’s
administration in New York City, the restoration and preservation of order on
New York streets or public spaces required that any broken window be mended,
just as the smallest act of law-breaking or defiance to public authority had to
be immediately noted and punished.
To
bring this philosophy to bear in the delivery of public services to the
disenfranchised, Giuliani stepped around legal protections for the poor by
contracting services like homeless shelters to privately-operated shelters that
imposed strict measures that were beyond public oversight. Anyone, for instance, who failed to tuck in
his blanket at New York’s privatized homeless shelters had to be confronted and
corrected; if the homeless individuals didn’t like it, then they could choose
to return to the underfunded and sometimes chaotic environments of the
remaining public shelters.
Privately-operated facilities would offer the
latitude for rules and enforcement practices that, otherwise, would not survive
the public scrutiny of institutions based on less punitive protocols and legal
protections. “Broken windows theory”
adheres to the notion that any crack in the dam requires an immediate and
forceful fixative in order to stem the flood of chaotic rule breaking that
threatens social order. At the same time, swift and sure interventions are
thought be the best training for the poor and disenfranchised, who are thought
to be unable to self-correct and to function as societal assets, rather than
liabilities.
Supporters of the “new
paternalism” find ideological grounding in the work of political scientist,
Lawrence Mead, whose writings (1986; 1993; 1997) inspired the get-tough welfare
reforms in New York and other U. S. cities during the 1990s. Though often draconian in its applications,
Mead’s philosophy, nonetheless, represents a less harsh solution than the one
advocated by people like Charles Murray, who has argued for severing welfare
programs entirely, and consequences be damned (Schram, 1999).
Instead, Mead calls for more
effective and efficient management of services by government bureaucrats, along
with accountability measures aimed to wean those receiving public services from
the need for them. In fact, the welfare reform legislation, The Personal Responsibility Work and Opportunity
Reconciliation Act of 1996, reflected the ideas of the new paternalists’ call
for “holding welfare recipients accountable for making progress toward
self-sufficiency” (Schram, 1999, p. 669).
The contributors
to Mead’s (1997) influential edited volume, The
New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty, advocate for a system whereby social policy, whether in the area
of child support, homelessness, drug treatment, or education, is designed
around strategies and tactics for changing the behaviors among the poor and
needy who depend upon public services.
Those following this line of thinking argue that the poor are incapable
of changing their attitudes and behaviors on their own without assistance. Therefore, it becomes the responsibility of
policy elites to create enforceable expectations that are deemed in the best
interests of those whose behaviors are targeted for change.
As a hybrid form
of political thought that combines liberal and conservative elements, it
advocates, essentially, for using government for conservative ends, i. e.,
to replace government authority with “social authority” as “the key to reducing
poverty” (Mead, 2012, para 6), even if government is required to initiate
interventions for achieving that social authority. As Mead summed up his social policy thinking
twelve years after publication of The New
Paternalism . . ., “Welfare recipients must work to get aid, the
homeless must obey rules to get shelter, and students must pass tests to be
promoted in school” (Mead, 2009).
If government
management by force is required to achieve individual conduct that ends the
need for government assistance to the poor, then so be it, according to James
Q. Wilson, who wrote the concluding essay for Mead’s The New Paternalism. In 1982
Wilson co-created (Kelling & Wilson, 1982,) “broken windows theory,” which
is based on the claim that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably
linked, in a kind of developmental sequence,” and that “if a window in a
building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will
soon be broken” (para 11).
Furthermore, if
regulations and legal protections get in the way of enforcement mechanisms and
accountability demands, as they did in New York City homeless shelters during
the 1990s, then contracting out government services to private firms is seen by
paternalists as a viable solution to existing
government assistance programs, which represent for paternalists
their own forms of governmental “broken windows.” As noted already, Giuliani’s “choice”
vouchers in New York were provided to homeless clients, who could then sign up
for private sector shelters that were not bound by government red tape or
oversight.
This, in effect,
guaranteed compliance by the homeless to strict rules intended to instill
character and good habits. Those
individuals who refused prescribed behaviors for shelter inhabitants in return
for the privilege of having a bed would be forced to return to the remaining
public shelters. Included
below is a somewhat lengthy quote by Thomas
Main (1997), who also had an essay in Mead’s The New Paternalism. The
rationale that Main offers for private sector
homeless shelters is the same one that underpins charter schools and the second
of KIPP’s Five Pillars: “students, their parents, and the faculty of each KIPP school
choose to participate in the program” (KIPP Foundation, 2015b):
Because
clients have no right to a particular shelter, private shelters
may require and enforce participation in their program as long as noncompliant
clients are free to return to a general shelter. [This] gives clients a degree of choice that
is not available in an all-city-run-system.
It also makes possible an exercise of authority that is less drastic
than the impermissible denial of city shelters.
Indeed, the provision of choice and the existence of a usable sanction
go hand-in-hand. It is because clients
make a voluntary choice to go to a certain program that the shelters can
reasonably expect clients to adhere to their program” (Main, 1997, p. 174).
Even though education
reformists usually base their arguments for the paternalistic corporate charter
schools like KIPP on innovative methods and an absence of bureaucratic
restrictions, the less acknowledged advantages come into focus when examining
KIPP’s authoritarian culture, total compliance demands, and character
alteration programs. As schools of
“choice,” KIPP is free to invite anyone who does not wish to abide by a
contract assuring compliance with KIPP expectations to return to the other
school choice that poor communities can usually offer: under-resourced public
schools that are ravaged by malignant neglect and generations of battering from
fanciful accountability demands.
Choosing the new paternalist
schools is often the only other choice in town for economically disadvantaged
parents. One of the ironies inherent in the operation of the “Knowledge Is
Power Program” is that acquiring the knowledge and character traits that KIPP
advertises to be the solution to inequality requires a totalizing
submissiveness to a domineering and “non-negotiable” system.
Chester Finn, the doyen of the
conservative education reform movement, has a chapter (Finn, 1997) in The New Paternalism, where he lays out
his case against any progressive agenda and for another era of reform centered
on the traditional basics, this time under closer supervision by
the new paternalists (Finn, 1997). In
2008, Finn once again offered his full-throated enthusiasm for paternalism in
schools (Finn & Kanstoroom, 2008): “. . . giving disadvantaged adolescents
a full and fair shot at success in life may require a period of close
supervision and explicit instruction in how to learn and how to live. If this
makes the schools paternalistic, many education reformers will have no
objection to the practice even if they’re nervous about the terminology . . .”
(xii-xiii).
As an enthusiastic advocate of
the new paternalist agenda, which begins by fixing any broken window and by
“sweating the small stuff,” Finn shows no such nervousness about imposing
academic, moral, or cultural values among the children of the poor:
The [No
Excuses] schools are preoccupied with fighting disorder; they fix the
proverbial broken windows quickly to deter further unruliness. Students are shown
exactly how they are expected to behave — how to sit in a chair without
slumping, how to track the teacher with their eyes, how to walk silently down
the hall, how to greet visitors with a firm handshake, and how to keep track of
daily assignments. Their behavior is closely monitored at all times and the
schools mete out real rewards for excellence and real punishments for
rule-breaking (p. x).
If nervousness remains at the
KIPP Foundation about admitting its paternalist agenda, the words and actions
within the KIPP schools leave no doubt as to the conscious efforts to establish
adherence among children to values and behaviors that are approved by No
Excuses interventionists. With child
poverty rates steadily increasing, such alterations have proven over the past
twenty years to be no small feat, and extraordinary interventions to change the
cultural and psychological realities of KIPP children now indicate a hardened
and more systematic commitment to the
paternalist program in schools to alter the effects of child poverty by
altering children, instead.
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